Fast-paced action scenes convey imminent danger vividly, but there’s little sense of a broader world here. The ending falls flat as the plot devolves into comic-book territory. But Adam belongs to a resistance movement he helps Juliette escape to their stronghold, where she finds that she’s not the only one with superhuman abilities. Unfortunately, he’s a soldier under orders from Warner, a power-hungry 19-year-old. Adam, it turns out, is immune to her deadly touch. After months of isolation, her captors suddenly give her a cellmate-Adam, a drop-dead gorgeous guy. Juliette’s journal holds her tortured thoughts in an attempt to repress memories of the horrific act that landed her in a cell. Juliette was torn from her home and thrown into an asylum by The Reestablishment, a militaristic regime in control since an environmental catastrophe left society in ruins.
Prolific YA and children's writer Yolen ( White Jenna, 1989, etc.) had a good idea here, but didn't follow through.Ī dystopic thriller joins the crowded shelves but doesn't distinguish itself. Meanwhile, overwrought emotions and hackneyed images ("his eyes were so blue she felt cut by them, as if they were ice") don't help, and Becca's relentless goody-goodiness grows more than a little annoying. The first half has little tension, since the Holocaust connection is pretty obvious things pick up once Becca travels to Poland, and the narrative of Gemma's wartime experiences is riveting and moving-but it's all told by a third party at the end of the book Becca doesn't so much solve the mystery as find a narrator to tell her the story.
The idea has lots of potential, but Yolen's thin novel fails to integrate the material smoothly.
The trail finally leads Becca to the site of an extermination camp in Poland. Although Gemma always identified strongly with Briar Rose, the sleeping princess, no one had thought it anything but a bedtime story-but when a mysterious box of clippings and photos turns up after Gemma's death, hinting that the accepted version of Gemma's origins is untrue, Becca begins tracing the real story, which bears striking resemblances to Gemma's fairy tale. Rebecca Berlin (Becca), the sweet young heroine, fondly recalls the odd version of Sleeping Beauty that her grandmother (Gemma) often told her and her sisters. The latest in the Fairy Tales series begins with a provocative premise: retelling the story of Sleeping Beauty as a Holocaust memoir.
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